Word: luridness
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Richard Strauss: Salome (Soprano Hildegard Behrens, Mezzo Agnes Baltsa, Tenor Karl-Walter Bohm, Baritone Jose Van Dam, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan conductor, Angel; 2 LPs). With Karajan, the orchestral music comes first, even in opera. Here he conducts a vibrant, sensuous performance of Strauss's lurid opera. Behrens as Salome may lack the cruel edge of Birgit Nilsson's performance on London. But Behrens' pure voice contrasts chillingly with Salome's lust, while Van Dam's ringing Jochanaan is a saintly counterpoint in a savage world...
...JEREMY SEDUCED ME, read a tittering headline in London's tabloid Daily Mail, as Britain's most lurid crime story in years entered a particularly purple phase. For a second week, a three-judge panel in Minehead, a remote town on the Somerset coast, was conducting a magistrate's hearing into charges that Jeremy Thorpe, 49, the dapper, old Etonian Liberal M.P. who had once been one of Britain's fastest rising political stars, had conspired to murder Norman Scott. A sometime male model, Scott had publicly proclaimed that he had once had a homosexual affair...
...standard of judgment can still be applied: "By their fruits ye shall know them." Visionaries, even when they operate from a cult, can bring dimensions of aspiration and change to religion, which otherwise might be merely a moral policeman. But the historical record of cults is ominous and often lurid. Jonestown, for all its gruesome power to shock, has its religious (or quasireligious) precedents...
...back alive. Therein American viewers, waiting to see Johnny Carson, were treated to the sight of a now-dead reporter interviewing and filming scores of people just a few hours before the deal went down for all of them. Never before have we been able to witness a lurid event in such detail. While the coverage has been good from an informational standpoint, it is somehow uncomfortable...as if it were an invasion of the dead's privacy...and unquestionably in poor taste. If you doubt that, take a quick look at the way Newsweek and Time featured bloated corpses...
...only tacked on at the beginning and at the end of the book. By and large, For Her Own Good is easy and entertaining to read right down to the footnotes. Crusading women are eminently quotable. Obsolete medical practices with an "inherent drift toward homicide" make for interesting, if lurid reading. Ehrenreich and English even render the home economics movement bearable...